Michael Dell has the won the battle for control of the computer company that he created, after shareholders backed his $24.8bn offer to take Dell private and revive the struggling business away from the incessant pressure of Wall Street.

The vote clears the way for the huge buyout, in which Dell is working with private equity partners Silver Lake after seeing off a challenge from activist investor Carl Icahn.

Must have been hard for him to see his baby slide into irrelevance. I hope for him he can turn things around, but I'm not sure if they'll be able to - they missed the boat, and it's probably in Fiji by now.

Looks like they will be making what they are now, but somehow doing a better job? Expect to see Dell's in Businesses and not much else. Maybe Microsoft will want a computer and server hardware division soon.

The investment into privatisation reminded me of their pouring money into Nokia, which is why I thought they might eventually become an MS hardware arm as you suggested.

However, while there are so many PC vendors out there, and they are all licensing windows, I can't believe MS would be stupid enough to compete with them - surely there aren't *that* many desktop applications left whose functionality can't be duplicated in OSX, Ubuntu, Android, iOS or even ChromeOS to some extent (especially given the new native code app announcement).

I almost hope they do acquire them, though - MS makes pretty sweet hardware.
The Surface is great except for the battery and screen, the zune was solid, and I love their peripherals.
Seeing as how Windows 8.1 is such a great improvement over 8 and 7, it would be pretty amazing to see some sleek MS-made Win8.1 laptops out there without the vendor crapware.

(Note: I only use GNU/Linux, except where development requires windows/osx)

Given the prominence of *nix on servers, would there be benefit for them in acquiring their own server hardware division, or would it be merely killing the golden goose, with consequences like HP moving further towards HP-UX?